NASA’s new shortcut to fusion power

https://spectrum.ieee.org/lattice-confinement-fusion

by GordonS • 4 years ago

200 138 4 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

willis9365• 4 years ago

Do the names "Fieschmann" and "Pons" ring any bells? Here is the wikipedia article that covers these recent developments. Look in the "Later Research" section.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion

DennisP5• 4 years ago

The NASA research isn't mentioned there. Differences from cold fusion: they're hitting the lattice with gamma rays, and seeing 2.45MeV neutrons come out.

Doesn't mean they'll achieve net power this way, or that the lattice will survive the neutrons at practical fusion rates, but they seem to be seeing D-D fusion reactions.

ch4s32• 4 years ago

Is it real or could there be unaccounted for neutron sources? That’s been an issue with past metal lattice setups.

fooker• 4 years ago

I misread lattice as lettuce and was a bit confused for a while about the purpose of hitting lettuce with gamma rays!

fernly• 4 years ago

Indeed, came to say the same. Toward the end of the IEEE article it has this:

We’ve also triggered nuclear reactions by pumping deuterium gas through a thin wall of a palladium-silver alloy tubing, and by electrolytically loading palladium with deuterium. In the latter experiment, we’ve detected fast neutrons.

"electrolytically loading palladium with deuterium" is very, very similar to the Pons/Fleischman setup, which was basically electrolysis with palladium electrodes.

yellow_postit• 4 years ago

Any good overviews on the different types of fusion and relative sense of liklihood to achieve their aims?

I know the throwaway comment is about fussion always being 30 years away but also does appear from the outside that hype/excitement is picking up for some of the recent advances in magnetic confinement fusion.

jyounker2• 4 years ago

Now everybody is saying 10 to 15 years, so it looks like we're getting somewhere.

bobsmooth• 4 years ago

General Fusion's demo plant should be operational in 3-4 years.

ncmncm4• 4 years ago

Or, they are starting to worry about getting their funding cut off because it will obviously never be commercially competitive with renewables.

orthecreedence2• 4 years ago

Existing fusion reactors rely on the resulting alpha particles—and the energy released in the process of their creation—to further heat the plasma. The plasma will then drive more nuclear reactions with the end goal of providing a net power gain. But there are limits. Even in the hottest plasmas that reactors can create, alpha particles will mostly skip past additional deuterium nuclei without transferring much energy. For a fusion reactor to be successful, it needs to create as many direct hits between alpha particles and deuterium nuclei as possible.

This is one of the most clear explanations of fusion power I've read so far. Worth a read just for that alone.

And as the technology matures, it could also find uses here on Earth, such as for small power plants for individual buildings

Distributed power generation is the ideal. Why bother with transporting energy when you can just generate it where you need it?

Really cool article/tech. I've not heard of LCF until now. Seems promising.

willis9365• 4 years ago

The reason to use MCF (and why IEC can't work) is that it's okay if particles don't collide often if they are confined for sufficiently long. So what if the fast alpha doesn't collide? It's charged and thus well confined. It will transfer its energy to other particles eventually.

PaulHoule2• 4 years ago

Inertial confinement fusion works just fine if you are building a 1 megaton device driven by a fission bomb. You probably can't make it work if you're driving with a laser because the wallplug efficiency of a laser is terrible, but at least you can build a failing facility which is only huge as opposed to gargantuan. Real breakeven might be possible with heavy ion beam ignition but the minimum size facility to make an attempt is gargantuan.

vkou6• 4 years ago

Why bother with transporting energy when you can just generate it where you need it?

For the same reason every household no longer grows, harvests and threshes its own wheat, bakes its own bread, and why Mao Zedong's Great Leap Foward idea of building a blast furnace in every village, in order to increase the country's steel output was an utter failure.

Power transmission is cheap, and economics greatly favor utility-scale deployments. You also get significantly less need for wasted peak capacity when multiple power producers can pool together into a grid.

shakezula• 4 years ago

For the same reason every household no longer grows, harvests and threshes its own wheat

This feels like a weird point to make when solar power is as popular and growing as it is.

Localized power generation is not only here now, we already have programs to tie your localized power generation into the existing power grid and you get paid for it. I don't see how this system couldn't work the same way.

orthecreedence2• 4 years ago

Tell that to my septic system!

If the cost of generating power drops, then distribution is a more viable model. Especially if you get extremely high fuel density. Also as we've found in California, power delivery can be very expensive.

doctor_eval2• 4 years ago

Ive read that creating enough food for a family of 4 from a home garden requires something like 8 square meters of land, chickens, and loads of labour. It’s non trivial, and if you make a mistake you go hungry.

Assuming some putative ideal future Mr Fusion, plugging it into the wall would be a completely different proposition, require relatively little space, and zero household labour.

Considering the massive infrastructure and street furniture required to distribute electrons, the unit economics of home fusion would need to be terrible in order for centralisation to remain competitive against the significant benefits for reliability and decentralisation.

79524• 4 years ago

Distributed power generation is the ideal. Why bother with transporting energy when you can just generate it where you need it?

You need to be able to throttle the power output up and down. That is harder to design and harder to make efficient. Or you need lots of batteries, which is expensive. And it all has to be sized for peak demand rather than being able to benefit from flows across the grid.

dd36• 4 years ago

Produce at double max and use the excess power to remove carbon from the atmosphere?

rbanffy2• 4 years ago

Size it for peak consumption and use the excess for bitcoin mining.

I'd prefer to do something really useful, like desalination, pre processing of waste water prior to dumping it into the sewers, and so on, but all these would require a lot of plumbing.

roscoebeezie• 4 years ago

Maybe excess energy could be used to recycle limited and precious elements from landfills via Santa Claus machine-like disassembly with very hot plasma. Horribly energy inefficient but may be useful in some situations.

perihelions• 4 years ago

- "One promising alternative is lattice confinement fusion (LCF), a type of fusion in which the nuclear fuel is bound in a metal lattice. The confinement encourages positively charged nuclei to fuse because the high electron density of the conductive metal reduces the likelihood that two nuclei will repel each other as they get closer together."

Isn't this just cold fusion? The end paragraph even credits an "International Conference on Cold Fusion".

DennisP5• 4 years ago

No, because of the gamma ray input.

pdonis3• 4 years ago

Isn't this just cold fusion?

No. You still have to heat the fuel. The claim of cold fusion was tnat the fuel could just sit there at room temperature and fuse.

drran4• 4 years ago

Cosmic rays and muons can initiate a nuclear reaction: they can have very high energy sometimes. If the metal plate is large enough, then it can be hit often enough to produce significant output, when it is not shielded from cosmic rays.

For example, lab at top floor or in mountain area may produce much more heat than lab in basement at sea level.

simonh2• 4 years ago

As many physicists pointed out at the time of the Fleischmann and Pons controversy, fusion at room temperatures may well be possible. If fact we know it’s possible because we have Fusors, and then there’s muon catalysed fusion. The problem wasn’t with the temperature range, it was with the not working and not being fusion.

JackFr2• 4 years ago

The problem wasn’t with the temperature range, it was with the not working and not being fusion.

And them being chemists not physicists.

And the University of Utah issuing a press release before the anything was peer reviewed.

The whole episode is is an example of what can go wrong with science. This article shows what clearly could have been a useful and productive field of investigation became poisoned to the extent that no significant research could go on for a quarter century and still the authors have to go to great pains to distance themselves from Fleischman and Pons.

willis9365• 4 years ago

Nothing about fusors are room temperature.

akimball2• 4 years ago

Yes, it is. The contrary position is motivated by a scurrilous need to justify ignoring the mechanism for 40 years, using semantic obfuscations.

WithinReason• 4 years ago

So cold fusion is viable after all, you just have make sure you call it something else so you're not laughed at. They are very careful to avoid the label:

"LCF isn’t cold fusion—it still requires energetic deuterons and can use neutrons to heat them."

pdonis3• 4 years ago

So cold fusion is viable after all

No, it isn't. There is more than just a change of name involved with LCF: the statement "it still requires energetic deuterons" means the deuterons still have to be hot. They can't be at room temperature.

mpreda• 4 years ago

From the article: Electron screening makes it seem as though the deuterons are fusing at a temperature of 11 million °C. In reality, the metal lattice remains much cooler than that, although it heats up somewhat from room temperature as the deuterons fuse.

Sounds pretty much the same as room temperature to me. Also the pictures with the experimental setup suggest that the glass does not melt, which is pretty cool.

itslennysfault• 4 years ago

How about we call it "Cool Fusion " as a compromise??

trhway2• 4 years ago

There is more than just a change of name involved with LCF: the statement "it still requires energetic deuterons" means the deuterons still have to be hot.

the original cold fusion experiments explanation was lattice confinement in heavy metal (i.e. large electron clouds) like Pt/Pd plus energetic deuterons. What was very unclear is where those deuterons got their energy. It was theorized something along the lines that high electrostatic charges in the metal cracks accelerate the deuterons, etc.

Unfortunately pseudo-scientificity got somehow attached to that research, and that for decades prevented any meaningful research into the source of those deuterons and how to efficiently increase their number and/or how to efficiently add another source. Only passage of time and the name change to LCF - marketing, yea! - has allowed to restart the research, though still without due credit to the original research.

phkahler4• 4 years ago

But with neutron reflectors and such, they hope to make it self sustaining. Insisting that it's not cold fusion really is splitting hairs.

I suspect a magnetic field will help reaction rates too, even though you'll have a hard time finding research supporting or refuting that.

Even I had wondered if firing neutron into a cold fusion cell might be helpful. Turns out it probably is. But then it's not cold, its LCF.

rasz• 4 years ago

Speaking of cold fusion, what happened to that Italian scam from few years back?

ah yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer still a scam

Throwthrowbob2• 4 years ago

https://ecat.com/

I'm disappointed, because the Dec 9 event was previously a new LED light of some sort, and now I can't find it with a cursory search.

$25 maybe for preorder at the time. Maybe I'll check wayback machine or something.

Throwthrowbob2• 4 years ago

It was called the SKLed:

http://web.archive.org/web/20210716204751/https://ecat.com/e...

and now redirects to a 404: https://ecat.com/ecat-skled

nynx• 4 years ago

I really hope this works.

Honestly, there are a number of low-hanging fruits in fusion.

More recent calculations show that, if you include the kinetic energy of the muons, Muon-catalyzed fusion may be net positive [0]. This LCF stuff is a low-hanging fruit too——ignored for many decades because scientists didn't want to hurt their reputations.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion#Alternat...

was_a_dev2• 4 years ago

Do those revised calculations take into the energy requirements for generating the muons?

The wikipedia article doesn't appear to give a clear answer

smaddox• 4 years ago

Good to see this field getting some serious investigation. Last I looked it was still very hypothetical with only questionable characters investigating.

JackFr2• 4 years ago

with only questionable characters investigating.

Well the assumption in the physics community is that if you're investigating this field you're a questionable character, so its surprising that it got investigated at all.

moffkalast• 4 years ago

Physicists look at cold fusion scientists like archaeologists do at ancient alien theorists?

nonrandomstring• 4 years ago

High energy Gamma sources don't sound like a fun and easy place to get started. Maybe that's why this is a NASA project for deep space, rather than something you'll be able to buy at Tesco.

was_a_dev2• 4 years ago

It can be done the same way x-rays can be generated. Accelerate electrons in a magnetic field using a syncrotron.

teeray• 4 years ago

I’m looking forward to the work Solomon Epstein is doing in this area

ncmncm4• 4 years ago

Willen haven been doinging.

DennisP5• 4 years ago

There seems to be an inconsistency in the article. First it says the Dynamitron produces gamma rays:

We can jump-start the fusion process using what is called a Dynamitron electron-beam accelerator. The electron beam hits a tantalum target and produces gamma rays, which then irradiate thumb-size vials containing titanium deuteride or erbium deuteride

But later it says:

producing neutrons from a Dynamitron is energy intensive. There are other, lower energy methods of producing neutrons including using an isotopic neutron source

Is the input neutrons or gamma rays?

parksy• 4 years ago

From what I gather the actual lattice requires neutrons. Their current setup uses an electron source (dynamitron) on tantalum which generates gamma rays. The gamma rays have the energy needed to push neutrons around inside the lattice. It seems they're saying it would be more energy efficient just to directly generate neutrons without having to go electron -> gamma -> neutron.

honkycat• 4 years ago

We need fusion, we need more power YESTERDAY.

Whatever amount we are spending to develop these moonshots it needs to be more.

So many "hard things" become that much easier when we remove having to power it out of the equation.

A generator for a forklift is probably unrealistic, but for a huge, skyscraper building crane? Or for one of those giant shipping barges that produce multiple percentage points of our carbon emissions? That no longer sound so crazy.

Isn't that how the US powers its aircraft carriers and submarines anyway? Only with fission, which clearly is too dangerous to put on civilian ships.

p1mrx• 4 years ago

Yeah, portable fusion would make large-scale power grids obsolete and revolutionize shipping. Things get more interesting when you scale it down to fit a passenger aircraft.

I'll believe it when they can power a toaster or something.

zw123456• 4 years ago

From 2020 https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/space/science/lattice-confinement-...

lowestprimate• 4 years ago

How does one extract power if it barely warms up? Does it generate electricity directly?

pfdietz4• 4 years ago

I don't believe this.

If deuterons could fuse with other deuterons in a metal lattice, this would have been seen ages ago, just by accelerating deuterons into a deuterium-loaded material. This is how neutron generator tubes work, and they've been used for longer than you've probably been alive.

What happens in these tubes is the vast majority of deuterons lose energy by ionization and don't undergo nuclear reactions. There is no radical increase in fusion from electron shielding.

drran4• 4 years ago

This was seen ages ago.

In 1989, two electrochemists, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, reported that their apparatus had produced anomalous heat ("excess heat") of a magnitude they asserted would defy explanation except in terms of nuclear processes. They further reported measuring small amounts of nuclear reaction byproducts, including neutrons and tritium. The small tabletop experiment involved electrolysis of heavy water on the surface of a palladium (Pd) electrode. The reported results received wide media attention and raised hopes of a cheap and abundant source of energy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion

pfdietz4• 4 years ago

Um, no. P&F saw nothing but their own experimental artifacts. Replication of their claims failed. Their setup was also different from this NASA one, with no gamma radiation shining on the palladium (and also palladium, not titanium or erbium as used by NASA.)

phkahler4• 4 years ago

Thanks for the reference to neutron generators. Wikipedia agrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_generator

Just maybe people wanting a neutron source stay with thin foils to let the neutrons out because that's what they want. I wouldn't be surprised if this method of initiating fusion we completely overlooked for 90 years, but turns out to be viable after all. There are still many questions to be answered since the probability of a fusion event still seems to be too low. I just wish people would do more searching for answers and less outright rejection.

pfdietz4• 4 years ago

The point I was making was that the physical effect they claim is occurring makes no sense, and would have glaringly shown up elsewhere, decades ago, if it actually was real.

jmyeet• 4 years ago

I didn't see an answer to the big question I have: what about energy loss (and, to a lesser extent, container damage) through neutron loss? There is this quote:

The released neutron may collide with another deuteron, accelerating it much as a pool cue accelerates a ball when striking it. This second, energetic deuteron then goes through one of two processes: screened fusion or a stripping reaction.

So a neutron "may" collide. But what if it doesn't?

To be fair, the density is a lot higher an dhtere's an erbium lattice so this may just be a non-issue (or at least a much-reduced issue).

Anyway, I'm glad to see alternatives to "hot" fusion being researched. I'm far from convinced the tokamak approach of massive boondoggles like ITER will ever be commercially viable.

eutropia• 4 years ago

this strikes me as the sort of thing that ends up as an engineering enhancement to an RTG that’s like “hybrid radio fusion heat engine” and uses a radioactive source together with this lattice confinement fusion material and end up with something like a 20% efficiency instead of the current 7.5%, but is otherwise never used outside of space probes.

nnurmanov• 4 years ago

The good thing is a lot of labs across the world trying to solve this problem. Here are some I am currently watching https://e-catworld.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z01586zdnM0

PickledHotdog• 4 years ago

NASA seems to achieve quite a bit with its relatively meagre budget

NASA’s new shortcut to fusion power

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